Ask HN: How do you manage work/life balance?

[zsection]

I tried searching HN but couldn't see this discussion anywhere... Wanted to know how you guys, particularly founders, manage work/life balance? In an ideal world, only people who actually successfully manage it respond...

[jmtame]

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington

Mark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.

It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.

If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want.

[kapitti]

Considering one of the first rounds of money that a startup takes is usually friends & family, I would suggest not sacrificing them.

You can maintain a healthy social life, or marriage, or keeping in touch with family, and still succeed. Read Balsamiq's story: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=79 - It's not the largest sample size, but he's not the only one doing it.

Your family and friends should support you. My wife understands the life, she understands that when I'm in "the zone" to put my dinner in the fridge and I'll reheat it later. I gave my wife 12 hours notice that 3 other rails hackers would be in our house for a weekend for RailsRumble - she went out and bought groceries and cooked for us. When the internet went down that weekend, her father came to our rescue and opened his lawfirm's office for us to work from - the end result, we won RailsRumble 2008 - and we did it with the support of our families.

The fact that I have obligations (Mortgage, Student Loans, Car Payment) keeps me focused.

[mattmaroon]

That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative.

If you're sacrificing friendships and family, you're not doing it right. And not only that, even if you succeed you'll end up wishing you didn't. I've seen this happen.

For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week.

[nostrademons]

I found it wasn't really the time that was a problem, it was attention. Even when I was at parties or with my families, I wasn't really mentally there, since there was always this cool algorithm or new approach that I was turning over in my head and wanted to try out. That tended to make parties not all that much fun for me, and me not all that much fun for the party. So even though I was only working 5-6 hours/day of actual coding, the mental effort spent thinking things through was all-consuming. It was depressing enough that I'm going back into the corporate world again - I'm not much of a work/life balance guy by nature, but I'd like more work/life balance than I had as a founder.

FWIW, none of the startup founders I know have much in the way of work/life balance, at least for the first 5 years or so of the company's life. It was not uncommon for them to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and take their first vacation when the company was about 4 years old. This doesn't mean it was a daily grind - just that their life became the company, and that's what they wanted to be working on even when they weren't officially at work.

Edit: I should make a distinction here between startups (organizations that are intended to grow really fast) and small businesses. I know several small business owners with good work/life balance: you kinda need it, since a small business is a long haul that'll consume you if you don't have some other sort of life. I don't know any startup founders with a life, during the startup phase.

Know what sort of business you want and be honest up-front with family, friends, investors, employees, and yourself. You aren't going to get rich in 4 years with a small business. But you can make a good living for yourself, sacrificing less of your personal life, with significantly less risk. If you're going to shoot for the moon, figure out what it would take to prove that you're aiming right, and bail out before you sacrifice too much if you're not.

[mattmaroon]

I know a lot of startup founders. Most of them work hard, for sure, but also have some balance. Some more than others. The two aren't incompatible, but it takes some work to make them otherwise.

[gamache]

Not to mention that most of those Type A busybees' startups will fail. All the hours in the world can't erase the fact that even good startups often tank, and most startups are founded on pretty cockamamie ideas anyway.

Equating hours-per-week with value is naive at best.

[jamesbritt]

"For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week."

Is there are tangible evidence for this? I agree with the idea of diminishing returns, but also think that one needs to put in more than 40 hours a week. But so far, the arguments are anecdotal.

[mattmaroon]

I certainly haven't done a study, no. I'd love to see one too.

I believe there has been some evidence that supports the ~40 hour work week. I suppose 40 exactly is a tad arbitrary, optimal number is probably some strange decimal, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't really close to 40 for the average person.

Perhaps it depends on the individual, perhaps for some its 40 and for some its 50, etc. Maybe the latter group succeeds more. I feel like this is untrue, but certainly can't prove it.

[PStamatiou]

right on.

[Harj]

that's a very narrow and unrealistic view of a startup. some of the most phenomenally productive people i've known and worked with don't pretend to be working every hour of the day. they work in short intense bursts in the knowledge that they'll still get more done than the people who kid themselves into thinking that sacrificing everything so they can be staring at their screens for 12 hours a day is the only way to be productive.

the best blog post i've found on this is from naval ravikant, http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...

[taylan]

jmtame is right; work-life balance shouldn't be your top priority, it shouldn't make you question the time you are investing in your startup. as you make progress opportunity cost of your time increases, i.e. an hour of your time when you got funded is a lot more precious than an hour when you were just starting out. also, an hour you spend on the "life" side is an hour NOT spent on your startup, and the cost for this increases as you make progress.

luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.

[nailer]

I'd class myself as a early adopter and I've been using the internet for a really long time.

I've never heard of broadcast.com.

Mark Cuban might have made a lot of money, but did he create something good that people know, love, and use?

Because I want to do the latter.

[fallentimes]

Broadcast.com, Dallas Mavericks, HD Net, MicroSolutions, a hedge fund, a movie distributor, a movie production business, angel investments...and they all weren't done after Broadcast.com either.

[nailer]

Never heard of HD Net or Microsolutions either (and I'm fairly sure Cuban didn't create the Dallas Mavericks). I'd rather be the guy/gal who created one well loved household name - say lastminute.com - than who made a mint on a lot of not well known known companies.

[fallentimes]

HD Net was the first all high definition television network, and is what helped spur all the mainstream networks (due to competition and audience response) to go HD. Cuban was on the HD bandwagon when it was empty. Haha he certainly didn't invent the Mavericks, but he completely transformed them & more importantly, made them a contender - much to the admiration of hundreds of thousands of Dallas Mavericks fans.

MicroSolutions was bought by CompuServe who you may or may not be familiar with. Have you heard the movies titled: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Good Night, and Good Luck? He was behind them.

I certainly get what you're saying, it's just that sometimes Cuban is wrongly portrayed as a one-trick pony. Also of note, I had never heard of lastminute.com until today. And even if i had, I doubt I'd know the person behind it.

[nailer]

Aren't they shutting down the analog TV network in the US and re-using the spectrum elsewhere, per the rest of the world? And aren't most networks happy with more channels and more chances to grab ad-revenue? Surely that would spurn the adoption of HD more than a particular competitor being first of the boat.

But I have heard of Good Night, and Good Luck, and perhaps the other film, if you mean the Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room). Those, and reinventing a sports team would be achievements of which I would be very proud.

[mapleoin]

sounds like Sparta to me

[speby]

Pre-founder: 9 to 5 work, 5 to 8/9 part-time startup, 8/9 to 1 life. Mon-Sat., usually Sundays are full-life.

Full-time founder: 9:30 to 11 work/coffee/eat, 11:30 to 3 work, 3 to 4 gym, 5 to 8 work, 8-11 eat/life, 11-1 work. Mon-Sat with Sunday usually being the most life and most relaxed.

You read that right... technically, I work the same or slightly less hours than with a full-time job and part-time founder responsibilities. Either way, it's about 60-70 hours a week.

[lionheart]

I work when I feel like it. I don't work when I feel like it.

I don't have a separate office and I haven't been able to stick to any schedule more concrete than that.

Its probably not an ideal situation, but it seems to be working out pretty well so far.

[mattmaroon]

Step 1: think about your priorities. This is something you should have done before starting up, of course. For instance I'm married, and my marriage comes before my business. If I had to choose one to fail, it would be the latter. My wife is very supportive, so I don't have to choose. If yours isn't, you will. Same to a large degree with friends and family.

Step 2: I call it Agile Life Development. Apply the same principles you do to your startup to your life as a whole. Start with a routine you think might work, run it for a few weeks, see if it does. If you find it's not keeping you both happy and productive, and working toward your goals while keeping your priorities in order, try to determine why and make some changes. Test again. In this case your product is your life and your user is you (and friends and family) so good feedback is really easy to come by. And you're definitely making something you want.

It'll take a while, but you'll get there. Just don't stop working on it. I've been attempting it for ~7 years now, and I'm still not where I would consider it perfect, but it's pretty damn good.

[vaksel]

9 to 8 work

8 to 2 life

2 to 9 sleep

Monday through Saturday, with Sundays off.

Sure if there is some emergency all bets are off, but I find that this gives me the most productivity, w/o really doing any damage to my personal life.

[hardik]

I would like to add another dimension to this question, how do you pre-founders manage work life balance? (Pre-founders being those who are still working their day jobs, hacking away at nights/weekends)

[brlewis]

Selective neglect: My closet is a mess. So is my basement. I spend time with my wife and kids.

Efficiency: I keep my priority list in front of me so I'm always coding the most important things. I use a Lisp dialect so that I can make effective use of short coding sessions. A lot of my progress in the past few years has been during 35-minute train rides.

[markbao]

7am to 3pm, school.

3pm to 12am, founder stuff.

12am panic about homework

[rms]

I very rarely did homework at home during high school... therefore my panic time was reduced to schooltime as I frantically tried to do the homework during other classes.

[rms]

Did other people do this? Or was the upmodding to say "I should have done this"?

[a-priori]

I don't know about other people, but I certainly did this in high school.

[iamdave]

I don't bring my work home with me. Under any circumstance.

Period.

[lallysingh]

On a more general note, a few hard rules like this are important. They do wonders.

For example, I'm off liquor until the PhD's finished. Permanently: no delivered pizza, and nothing but regular coffee or espresso from coffee shops (specifically, no mochas, which I take like liquid crack).

I can ignore the rules for special occasions, which helps keep me in moderation even when I'm in these unusual circumstances.

[catone]

I recently wrote a blog post about something similar that might be applicable here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/19/12-ways-to-keep-sa...

The article was geared toward home workers and focused on tips and tricks to avoid getting stir crazy. But a lot of it talks about how to keep work and personal lives separate, which is especially difficult when your home is your office. So much of the post may be helpful to you.

Short version of my tips of things to do during the work day to stay sane:

1. Clearly define your work space. 2. Take a walk. 3. Take a nap. 4. Have lunch with a friend. 5. Join a local user group. 6. Engage with a community online. 7. Use Twitter. 8. Subscribe to a trade magazine. 9. Keep work and personal contact info separate. 10. Get a cat (or a dog). 11. Take regular breaks. 12. Schedule time off.

[ideamonk]

6am - 5pm : for college

5pm - 12am : trying to manage work/life balance

that 5-12 includes trying to take rest, managing college assignments if any... and basically trying to do too many things... so work/life balance hardly exists :(

If I play some backetball in the evening I haven't the energy to do much that night. the "/" in "work/life" sometimes seems to translate to "work" OR "life".. choose any :P

[siong1987]

9am to 3pm: study 3pm to 1am: work <- Work is my life.

Enjoy your work like you enjoy your life.

[justinchen]

I just make sure that when my wife has time off, that I take time off to spend time with her. I close the computer and don't try to multi-task. Makes work and life more productive.

[juliend2]

Quality of time is the key. I wake up early (around 5h30 am) because it's the best time to get things done. My mind is clear and it goes fast.

I never work during sundays. That's my only limit.

[known]

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/0329226 for an IT worker.

[pasbesoin]

Make sure your home environment is one that you want to spend time in. If you are "avoiding home", you are at work for the wrong reason.

[cubicle67]

badly

[henryw]

i used to believe in working lots of hours. reading 4 hour work week changed my mind some. one thing i took away was: do the 20% of things that gives you 80% of productivity and skip the rest.

[sharjeel]

By calling work my life

[auston]

i dont, my girlfriend does it for me.